From what I read, when mounting a network share via nautilus or gvfs-mount the mount point should be in ~/.gvfs. This seems not to be the case for me: I tried mounting both an FTP and SMB share via both nautilus and gvfs-mount under both Ubuntu Maverick and Natty and in none of the cases did I see any mount point under ~/.gvfs. I can access the shares just find in nautilus, but I want to have access via the command line, which is why I need a mount point in the file system.

Edit: Debugging following James Henstridge's answer and enzotib's comment revealed that on my laptop gvfs-fuse-daemon is running and consequently gvfs mounts show up in ~/.gvfs, whereas on the 2 workstations where ~/.gvfs remained empty gvfs-fuse-daemon was not running. On all 3 machines there are other gvfs processes running: gvfsd, gvfs-afc-volume-monitor, ...

Can you show the output of mount | grep gvfs?
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enzotibSep 13 '11 at 13:51

A follow up to this question: When mounting a windows shared folder it indeed is accessible in /run/user/iw/gvfs/smb-share:server=192.168.1.10,share=iwbgit$ My problem, however, is that i need the contents of these files to be in ~/. This is because node.js wants the files to be here (don't ask me why yet). However, trying to symlink to this folder, or do cp -R on its contents seems to not work. My guess is it's because of all those special signs :, =, $ in the folder name that causes the above processes to fail. Or actually, to be very preceise: only the .git subfolder is copied (then cp -R s
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codebreakerMar 24 '13 at 20:43

1

@codebreaker I think your comment is truncated. It seems you're asking "How do I symlink a folder with special characters?". Have you made sure you escaped them correctly? Can you list the directory contents when accessing via the symlink? However, since your question is not really specific to gvfs mount points I suggest you search if it has been answered or ask a separate question.
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kynanMar 24 '13 at 23:04

8 Answers
8

The ~/.gvfs directory should be a FUSE mount handled by the gvfs-fuse-daemon process. If the directory appears to be empty, it would indicate that gvfs-fuse-daemon did not start correctly.

You could try starting it manually with the following command:

/usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-fuse-daemon ~/.gvfs

If that fails, you could try checking whether anything else is mounted there, or even delete and recreate the ~/.gvfs directory first. If things still fail, could you update your question and provide any error messages printed by gvfs-fuse-daemon?

Some more research revealed that gvfsd is supposed to start gvfs-fuse-daemon automatically when gvfsd gets the first request to access a remote file system. There's also a bug in ubuntu/debian that makes the ~/.gvfs directory unreadable when gvfs-fuse-daemon crashes and produces the error message Transport endpoint is not connected.
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kynanSep 15 '11 at 0:10

Was it ever resolved why gvfsd does not start gvfs-fuse-daemon automatically? Under RHEL it seems to work as expected for root but not unprivileged users.
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Aaron CopleyJun 18 '12 at 22:21

When I want to access files shared from a Windows machine directly (not browsing through Nautilus) I mount the share on a folder in my home directory.

For example. There if there is a Windows machine with the IP address 192.168.16.2 on the domain mydomain that has a folder shared as shared and I have a directory in my home directory called mnt, I can mount the share onmnt and access it as if it was within my home directory with:

No, but kynan said "but I want to have access via the command line, which is why I need a mount point in the file system", so I'm just trying to help.
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Stacey RichardsSep 13 '11 at 12:31

Thanks. I should have mentioned that I have considered this solution, but it imho has 2 major downsides that make it infeasible: 1) the credentials file must contain the password in plain text, which is unacceptable on a shared machine, 2) it requires root privileges and I need a solution that also works on machines where I don't have sudo
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kynanSep 14 '11 at 22:20